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Publisher Plus is a curious app. It’s seemingly laboring under the misapprehension that Apple’s Pages does not exist. It’s like someone’s grabbed Pages, pulled off some of the complicated bits, and glued some clip art and templates onto what remains. Oddly, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

VVVVVV is a fairly simple platformer, but one crafted and refined to mechanical perfection. The controls are as basic as the visuals — go left, go right, and flip gravity. But this game is full of things that complicate matters.

Sold only as a set with the Slide ruler, Adobe Ink is a 5.67-inch digital pen manufactured by the Photoshop maker’s hardware partner Adonit. With an aluminum shell and weighing less than an ounce, Ink communicates via Bluetooth 4.0 LE with recent iPad models, and is capable of writing or drawing on the screen and making menu selections from any app. So how does Adobe's first foray into hardware fare? Read on to find out.

This Thunderbolt drive enclosure has space for two 2.5-inch disks of your choosing; install a couple of SSDs and you can build a very fast external drive. The disks can be used as independent volumes, or you can combine them into a striped RAID array.

In 2013, Parallels Access wowed us by making remote desktop access usable from an iPad — although it was saddled with an expensive annual subscription. What a difference a year makes, as the sequel offers more bang for fewer bucks, and serves the fun to more devices.

The concept of a less-expensive iMac for those on a budget, perhaps students, is great. However, this is not cheap. Cheaper than the rest of the range, sure, but if you consider more than a thousand bucks to be “cheap,” you might want to consider looking at the more advanced iMacs that are available.

If you have children of a certain age, you could be forgiven for thinking Angry Birds are everywhere. Rovio’s hit franchise has dominated the App Store in its four-and-a-half year, eight game run, and has branched out successfully into toys, a cartoon, and even soft drinks. And now Angry Birds Epic continues the trend of branching out from its humble slingshot-firing origins.

Broken Age is the story of two very different characters breaking away from their respective destinies and fighting back against their oppressors, whether it’s a huge monster or a restricting environment. You play as them both in this point-and-tap iPad adventure, switching between their stories as you see fit until you reach the cliffhanger at the end.

By the time Infinity Ward released Modern Warfare 3 in 2011, Call of Duty’s style was well-established: the single-player mode should be bombastic, jingoistic, and cinematic, while a robust and quick-paced multiplayer portion comprises the bulk of the experience. But it also depends on an eager player base and densely populated servers. Unfortunately, Aspyr’s Mac port, released three years since, has neither.

Akvis Retoucher is a great way to remove dust, scratches, and watermarks from old photos. You can select and mask large areas to correct, or make finer corrections using features such as the Clone Stamp and Chameleon Tool, the latter of which is similar to Photoshop’s Pattern Stamp. Finding the perfect parameters can be hit and miss, but the results are good.